Platform Architect
Role Overview
We are looking for an experienced Platform Architect to define and drive the architecture of a modern, cloud-native platform supporting scalable, secure, and resilient applications.
The role requires strong expertise in containerization, microservices, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, Redis, multi-tenant architecture, and cross-region deployment. Microsoft Azure experience is preferred.
The Platform Architect will work closely with engineering, DevOps/SRE, security, and product teams to establish platform standards, reference architectures, and reusable technical patterns.
Key Responsibilities
- Define the overall architecture and technical direction for the platform.
- Design scalable and resilient microservices-based architectures.
- Establish standards for containerized workloads and Kubernetes deployments.
- Define cloud architecture using Azure services and cloud-native design principles.
- Design secure and scalable multi-tenant architectures, including tenant isolation and resource segregation.
- Define multi-region deployment, failover, disaster recovery, and resilience strategies.
- Design caching and distributed state-management solutions using Redis.
- Establish standards for service communication, API design, asynchronous messaging, retries, resiliency, and fault handling.
- Define platform security patterns including identity, access control, secrets management, and workload isolation.
- Define observability standards for logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and service health.
- Guide Infrastructure-as-Code, CI/CD, and automated platform deployment practices.
- Conduct architecture and design reviews and drive resolution of architectural risks and technical debt.
- Create and maintain reference architectures, design documentation, and architecture decisions.
- Mentor engineering teams on cloud-native and distributed-system design practices.
Core Technical Skills
Must Have
Containerization
- Strong experience with Docker/OCI containers.
- Understanding of container lifecycle, security, networking, and image optimization.
Kubernetes
- Strong hands-on architectural knowledge of Kubernetes.
- Experience with:
- Deployments, StatefulSets, Services, and Ingress
- ConfigMaps and Secrets
- Autoscaling and resource management
- Persistent storage
- RBAC and network policies
- Cluster and workload high availability
- Experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) preferred.
Microservices & Distributed Systems
- Strong understanding of:
- REST APIs and service-to-service communication
- Event-driven and asynchronous architectures
- API gateways
- Service decomposition
- Resiliency patterns
- Distributed transactions
- Eventual consistency
- Idempotency
- Fault tolerance and graceful degradation
Cloud Architecture
- Strong cloud architecture experience, preferably with Microsoft Azure.
- Familiarity with relevant Azure services such as:
- AKS
- Azure Container Registry
- Azure Front Door / Application Gateway
- Virtual Networks and Private Link
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Managed Identities
- Key Vault
- Azure Monitor / Application Insights
- Azure Storage
- Azure SQL or equivalent databases
- Azure Service Bus / Event Hubs
- Azure Managed Redis
Redis
- Experience designing Redis for:
- Distributed caching
- Session or transient state
- High availability
- Replication and clustering
- Cache invalidation
- Performance optimization
Multi-Tenant Architecture
- Experience designing SaaS or shared platforms with:
- Tenant isolation
- Identity and authorization boundaries
- Data and resource segregation
- Tenant provisioning
- Noisy-neighbor mitigation
- Tenant-level monitoring and configuration
Multi-Region Architecture
- Experience designing:
- Regional deployment patterns
- Active-active and active-passive architectures
- Traffic routing
- Disaster recovery
- Regional failover
- Data replication
- RTO/RPO strategies
Preferred Skills
Experience in one or more of the following areas is desirable:
- Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or Bicep
- Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
- Helm and GitOps
- Kafka, Azure Service Bus, or Event Hubs
- OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana
- API Management and service mesh
- SQL and NoSQL databases
- Zero-trust and cloud security
- SRE and reliability engineering practices
Experience
- Typically 10+ years of software or platform engineering experience.
- At least 4–6 years of experience in cloud-native and distributed-system architecture.
- Proven experience architecting production platforms using Kubernetes and microservices.
- Experience designing highly available, scalable, and resilient systems.
Key Architecture Competencies
The candidate should be able to evaluate architectural trade-offs such as:
- Shared vs dedicated tenant infrastructure
- Shared Kubernetes clusters vs tenant-specific clusters
- Database-per-tenant vs shared database models
- Stateless vs stateful services
- Synchronous APIs vs asynchronous messaging
- Active-active vs active-passive regional deployments
- Managed cloud services vs self-managed components
- Security and isolation vs infrastructure cost